Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

The chapters appearing in this volume were fi rst presented at the seventh
annual conference on presidential rhetoric held at Texas A&M
University’s Presidential Conference Center, March 1–4, 2001. The conference
was sponsored by the Program in Presidential Rhetoric, a research
unit of the Center for Presidential Studies in the George Bush School of...

Over the course of U.S. history, few questions have been as
enduring, as emotional, and as imperative as the question of, in Harry
Truman’s words, “whom we shall welcome” to the nation’s shores and
its citizenry. Although immigration to the United States has often been
viewed primarily as a public policy problem, it represents something of...

Chapter 1. President of All the People

Consider the role of the president of the United States as king,
obliged to represent and to speak for all the people. There is a lot of meaning
packed into the phrase “represent all the people.” A king is not just
a manager, the head of an administration; not even a prime minister, in
the European fashion, or just a “representative” in the way a U.S. Senator...

Chapter 2. The Aliens Are Coming: The Federalist Attack
on the First Amendment

Alexander Hamilton, born a bastard in the Bahamas, rose to become
George Washington’s aide de camp, speechwriter, and secretary of the
Treasury. As one of the writers of The Federalist Papers, he was in the
center of the fight for the ratification of a new constitution, though his
arrogance sometimes retarded the process. He opposed adding a bill of...

Chapter 3. Presidents and Religious Diversity in the Nineteenth
Century

When the successors of George Washington took the oath
of office in the early nineteenth century, they inherited an immigrant
nation that was largely “unchurched.” Roger Finke and Rodney Stark
estimate that only about 17 percent of the population in the colonies
identified with a religious denomination or attended church at the time...

Chapter 4. Chinese Exclusion: Causes and Consequences,
1882–1943

Chinese exclusion influenced the development of both American immigration policy and the bureaucracy created to enforce
that policy. This chapter aims to show how the Chinese Exclusion Act
of 1882 came to be enacted and to explain presidential involvement
with Chinese immigration and the consequences of that involvement...

Chapter 5. Hooking the Hyphen: Woodrow Wilson’s War Rhetoric
and the Italian American Community

Sociologist Arthur Train posed the following questions in an
article about Italian Americans published in the Saturday Evening Post in
1918: “And why has not this great heterogeneous multitude of people
become better absorbed into the body of our native American population?
Why is it still speaking and reading in its own divers [sic] tongues? What...

Chapter 6. Immigration and the Red Scare

The notable restrictions on immigration in the temporary Act of
Congress of 1921, which increased and were made permanent in the Act
of 1924, derived from a change in the national temper that became clear
during World War I and rose to its height in 1919 and 1920, at the time
of the Red Scare. These legislative acts were, alas, entirely in accord with...

Chapter 7. Can the Alien Speak? The McCarran-Walter Act and
the First Amendment

A quick quiz: What do the following people have in common? French
philosopher Michel Foucault, French entertainer Maurice Chevalier, the
Right Reverend Hewlett Johnson, Anglican Dean of Canterbury, English
poet Stephen Spender, English novelists Graham Greene, Doris Lessing,
and Iris Murdoch, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, English political scientist...

Chapter 8. Questions of Race, Caste, and Citizenship: H

During the initial months of George W. Bush’s first term in
executive office, the president’s administration was proposing several
immigration reforms. Even though reports of anti-immigrant attitudes
and activities had appeared in the media at the time, labor conditions
for immigrants were receiving notably less attention.1 Indeed, the...

Yet, as Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum,
a pro-immigration group, noted, Americans have a love-hate relationship
with immigrants based upon the conflict “between the traditions
of America as a nation of laws and as a nation of immigrants.”1 Americans
want immigrants to enter the United States legally, even though some...

The history of immigration in American presidential rhetoric may
be regarded as a record of responses to the defining question posed by
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1783: “What then is the American,
this new man?” Although presidents and presidential candidates from
Washington forward have addressed the assimilation of new immigrants...

Afterword: A New Hope or a Recurring Fear?

In the introduction, I suggested that the history of political rhetoric
concerning immigration to the United States could be read through
a long-standing cultural dialectic that features the immigrant as both a
symbol of hope and a source of fear. In these final pages, I offer a more
specific account of how I see this dialectic playing out within the individual...

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